EDF suing eco-terrorists for £5m

! This post hasn't been updated in over a year. A lot can change in a year including my opinion and the amount of naughty words I use. There's a good chance that there's something in what's written below that someone will find objectionable. That's fine, if I tried to please everybody all of the time then I'd be a Lib Dem (remember them?) and I'm certainly not one of those. The point is, I'm not the kind of person to try and alter history in case I said something in the past that someone can use against me in the future but just remember that the person I was then isn't the person I am now nor the person I'll be in a year's time.

French electricity company EDF is suing 21 eco-terrorists who shut down one of their power plants for a week last year. The 21 activists from “No Dash for Gas” have been convicted of aggravated trespass.

The eco-terrorists are complaining that it’s not fair for a number of reasons which can largely be summed up as “EDF can afford the £5m loss” and “the police helped EDF”. Naturally the extremist Green MP, Caroline Lucas, is supporting the “No Dash for Gas” eco-terrorists.

Let’s have a look at some of the things they say …

The amount of the claim represents just 0.3% of EDF’s annual UK profits, which rose by 7.5% this year to £1.7 billion.

Whether the company can afford to lose the money or not is irrelevant. They have an obligation to make as much money for their shareholders as they can whilst staying within the law. If a group of eco-terrorists shaves £5m off their profits by engaging in criminal activities then they don’t have much choice but to try and recoup some of those losses. It’s not just EDF that stand to lose from the £5m cost of closing their plant down for a week either – the pension funds that earn money from investing in EDF will also lose out, hitting pensioners in their pockets. It’s not just big business that loses out when big business loses money.

This is the first time an energy company has attempted such a claim, and campaigners say it represents the opening of a new front against peaceful direct action protesters

This is nothing to do with peaceful direct action protesters, it’s targeting eco-terrorists who committed criminal trespass and shut down a power station for a week costing the owner of the power station £5m. Any peaceful direct action protester who stays within the law has nothing to worry about.

Sixteen campaigners occupied two chimneys at West Burton for a week in October 2012, stopping nearly 20,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions

That might be impressive if it was proven that CO2 causes changes to climate cycles which it doesn’t. Quite the opposite in fact. But regardless of whether you believe in the global warming claptrap this lot do, producing CO2 isn’t an illegal act so you can’t use it as a necessity defence.

The campaigners believe that Nottinghamshire Police’s support for the civil claim is part of a larger strategy to crack down on environmental protest, as evidenced by the use of extremely onerous bail conditions on the activists after their arrest. They were not allowed to associate with each other and most were subject to home curfews from 9pm to 7am.

What the eco-terrorists did is terrorism according to the Terrorism Act 2000 and they were treated no worse than any other terrorist suspect.

In another incident, Counter Terrorism Command officers visited an activist at her home to ‘remind’ her of her bail conditions and caution her against going within 50 metres of E.ON’s Grain Island Power Station.

Counter-terrorism police visit terrorist suspect to remind her she’s not allowed near a potential terrorist target. Well there’s a shocker.

The police are meant to be working in the public interest, not acting as EDF’s private police force. If I wanted to sue EDF over their pollution or their price hikes, would you expect the police to deliver the legal papers to EDF on my behalf, or hand over the names and addresses of their top executives? Somehow, I don’t think so.

Perhaps if the EDF executives were suspected of terrorist offences and they’d cost you £5m they might.

The Committee also point out that a greater reliance on gas would increase household bills by up to six times more than a shift to renewable energy

Windmills are the most expensive form of electricity production we have and cost the taxpayer billions in subsidies to only produce enough electricity to power a large town. It is the “green” electricity industry that is bumping up bills and all because some self-proclaimed “experts” have concocted some bullshit stories, repeatedly proven to be inaccurate, about global warming to access millions of pounds of government grants.

The case is reminiscent of the record-breaking “McLibel” case, when the fast food chain McDonalds sued two activists from North London from 1990-1997

No, it’s really not. That was a libel case for a leaflet that was ruled to have made largely unfounded claims against a fast food chain that lost McDonalds such a little amount of business that they would probably have struggled to quantify it while this is a criminal act of terrorism that shut down a power plant and cost the operator £5m.

2 comments

I’m sure I’ll be accused of some sort of ‘relativism’ but this is a matter of perspective. I do not condone trespass and vandalism but I think classifying environmental protestors as terrorists, where their actions have clearly not induced a feeling of terror and could not reasonably be alleged to have done so, is inappropriate and unacceptable. Vandals and trespassers can be dealt with under less draconian legislation, without recourse to ‘anti-terror’ laws. While I do not condone their actions, and certainly do not want my electricity supply interrupted because of them, I can see that they are simply doing what we may ourselves one day feel compelled to do: taking direct action in the pursuit of our cause that, while non violent, is deemed unlawful, even if not generally thought unreasonable.

Before anyone is carried away by apoplexy, I agree wholeheartedly that those who, for example, send anthrax or letter bombs to vivisectionists are terrorists, since their aim is to kill or maim with the intention of inducing terror in others.